The applicability of Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) in China has been analyzed. The main aspects of this research comprise goodness of fit test, capability in reproducing history drought events and the comparison between SPEI and Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), both of which are widely used in drought monitoring and analysis. The result of goodness of fit test shows that for the boreal winter and shortest time scales, the precipitation minus potential evapotranspiration series fail to match the presumed Log-logistic distribution in the south of Xinjiang, the northwest of Tibet and the area from North China to Hetao indicating the unreliability of SPEI values. With mentioned exceptions above, for most regions nationwide a good fit between the sample series and the Log-logistic distribution independent of the time scale and the month of the year guarantees the robustness of SPEI computation. Secondly, the comparison between spatial distribution of SPEI and China Historical Drought Dataset in typical years indicates that SPEI has good performance in measuring drought as well as flood. Furthermore, the relationship among SPEI, SPI and PDSI is also analyzed. The correlation coefficient between SPEI and SPI is roughly above 0.8 for different time scales. However, how well the SPEI correlated with PDSI relies on the time scale. When the time scale is less than 10 months, the poor correlation is observed between SPEI and PDSI; when the time scale is greater than 10 months, the correlation coefficient between SPEI and PDSI remains between 0.7 and 0.9. The comparison result shows that if the suitable time scale is chosen, the statistically based drought index, SPEI, has the similar capacity with PDSI which is based on complex soil water balance to describe and monitor drought reasonably. Furthermore, the SPEI has flexibility to adapt to intrinsic multi-scale nature of drought and advantage over simple calculation.
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